If you’re a capitalist or free market capitalist specifically, you might say private equity deserves to acquire all these businesses. As someone who believes in private markets, I do agree that private markets are best, but the degree of power for high AUM businesses cause destabilizing effects on the economy namely monopolization.
At a certain point, if all your mom and pop businesses are owned by a PE firm, any small competitor that rises can get priced out by undercutting prices and taking a loss temporarily until the small competitor is gone simply because PE firms’ massive revenue streams means they can take the loss whereas the smart competitor could not.
Additionally, the profit maximization of firms is a good concept because it’s true. However, at a certain point, the humongous maximization of profit means you can price out a community.
Another issue are publicly traded companies. The short term angle of executives make firms maximize profits too harshly.
On the flip side, firms like OpenAI would never exist in the public. They’ve seen humongous business and creative use cases such as in software and law. Though many people haven’t seen their business benefits and there are concerning uses such as cheating on homework or being intellectually lazy and delegating to ChatGPT which is a choice — like social media refusal — which can be good in many peoples’ cases, there are real large benefits to their existence at the very least if not to continual upgrading them. A government could never fund something that “takes jobs” yet is helping increasing productivity, especially for programmers.
I mention these examples above not to elaborate or discover nuance in capitalism vs. socialism. Rather, if you start off as a free market capitalist, you would avoid any discussion on the communal harm of the profit maximization and degree of leverage of huge businesses over small competition through the power of money. On the flip side, if you’re a socialist of any kind, there’s a belief that they could help everyone by owning who to fund, yet in any model whether federal bureaucratic investments or small union banks would never be able to fund something like OpenAI. These are trade offs, and both sides can learn from each others’ reasonings for wanting certain models, why they benefit society, how they harm society, rather than their solutions.
I’ve been told if more people got college degrees they’d be more progressive, and I don’t think that’s entirely true. Though I do think college allows people to learn more about others and thus make them more accepting of others who are not like them, I think there is a communal effect that makes new college freshmen liberal over time such as the necessity to agree with each other in their tight knit community. For instance, take notice of the politics of the econ department vs. the rest of campus; the dichotomy lies between each rather than within. I think there is a moral and intellectual superiority complex from Democrats (specifically, not in particular left or liberal, but Democrats in our world of tribalism) hence the criticism of their purity test. I think the online groupthink discourse that led to cancel culture is groupthink that made the purity test. I do think purity tests are fairly natural for people. Certain conduct being unacceptable is the point of ethics and morality, and people have had those forever such as abortion, community rules, and age of sexual consent. I’ve illustrated capitalism vs. socialism because of two issues:
- Most college students lean into socialism because the rest of campus aren’t detailing the reasoning of private markets/capitalism existence for millennia. The fundamental nature of humans is never changing and never did under any historical regime. I’ve been told the only way for socialism to work is through instituting a socialist religion because of human’s flaws. I think the world reaches an equilibrium based on human nature. The problem is exposure to each others’ detailed reasonings.
- Now, if you’re an econ or free market believer or hardcore Marxist socialists, without deeper understanding of the problems or capitalism or the reasoning socialism is so popular, you would never be accepting of amending laws to our great private market. Yet I see two truths but extreme solutions that are incompatible with the fundamental nature of people. Being stuck to these ideologies means people aren’t learning and become unwilling to learn too.
I’ve also been told more people should get college degrees in general. Though it’s a slight tangent, I want to briefly mention the reasoning. The result isn’t for more liberal democracy or for more people to become progressive, rather there’s an underlying belief that college makes people smarter and can thus operate better in society. I agree with that sentiment, yet I don’t believe it should be to promote college. I believe we have a perfect system of K-12 education but should require students to be a lot better at their studies without giving up their passions and ambitions. Let’s be honest. The majority of people who have poor grades do not have the passions and ambitions of dropouts like Steve Jobs. It’s why the common question “what are you going to do in life” to a high schooler is not only common but also feels like a death sentence during Christmas dinner.
I think colleges recognize this hence many colleges require students to take classes in fields outside one’s major. People always take the introductory courses, but it’s just an extension of K-12 education.
I find the notion that making people smarter would make one progressive or taking people to college would push someone to be more liberal to be historically true, but it misses the bigger picture: though it may expose one to a larger world outside their small childhood community (at least in America) and make them potentially more tolerable (are Democrats tolerable? I think they’re tolerable if it suits their politics; some Democrats say they’re tolerable because of moral superiority, but I find that intolerable of others’ morals; for instance, it’s not morally superior for conservatives being pro-abortion), it does not help the end goal which is to make society better.
College’s purpose, from its original onset to the modern college experience with the requirement for people to learn other subjects (and politically motivated classes such as a “Don’t be racist” Race and Ethnicity class in business school), is to help students specialize and be prepared for a career. I believe careers help expose one to human nature a lot more than college because it involves being a fiscally responsible adult and seeing the small picture politics between people inside the workplace. College exposes one to subjects that interest them and helps them in their work. It doesn’t help them when it comes to big picture politics like economic ideology. (As a note, college has many wonderful opportunities like diving into communities, helping transition into being a young adult, and side effects like elevating one’s ego and making college a core talent metric)
Taking a step back out of politics, I think LLMs are a good example of huge online discourse that many people across the American political spectrum dislike being shoved down their throats, whether the dislike is for taking jobs, building data centers that are raising electricity prices during a great inflationary period of time, etc. There’s much to dislike if it hasn’t positively affected your life. I think a lot of people who dislike the idea of LLMs haven’t been positively impacted or see the productivity value, even if it comes with new issues (e.g. writing 10x code compared to handwriting, but spending a little more time reviewing LLMs’ code compared to writing it yourself. The time spent reviewing increased, but the amount of code pushed increased a lot more, freeing up time to do other things).
My point is, the general populace usually hasn’t taken the effort to learn or research to truly understand the debate. Online social media has made debates worse because they’re all superficial rather than deeply academic. I’m not suggesting people are undeserving of opinion or public opinion. But the sway of the uninformed online is affecting national politics and people’s lives.
This won’t ever end. Social media is a blessing and a curse, delivering information and new knowledge to people faster than ever. The online forums that people usually consume like Instagram, TikTok, or Reddit amplify voices that want to be heard, and the algorithms and humans behaviorally needing simplification will always receive extreme messaging without the nuance. Academics need to step up and inject their knowledge and nuance into the online discourse.